The wisdom — or lack thereof — of the deal cannot be measured accurately until at least several years have passed.

Clarity only will emerge when the following questions are answered:

1. Will Andrew Bynum become a superstar and will he remain healthy over the next several years?Make no mistake, the Magic made a momentous decision in this trade: They chose not to acquire Bynum, whom most NBA experts regard as the sport’s second-best center.

Having Bynum for the 2012-13 season could have kept the Magic a playoff team.

Magic officials had a number of reasons for not insisting on Bynum. They were concerned about the long-term health of his knees, his immaturity and whether he would re-sign for the long-term.

If Bynum has injury troubles in the years ahead, the Magic will be vindicated for not acquiring him.

That said, one of the criticisms of the deal — that the Nets offered better draft picks — is inaccurate. The Nets offered three first-round picks, not four. And if the Nets teamed Howard with Deron Williams and Joe Johnson and Gerald Wallace, the Nets would’ve become a perennial powerhouse, rendering those picks in the high 20s overall year after year.

4. Can the Magic trade some combination of the players and draft picks they acquired into a great player or players down the line?We’ll see.

5. Will the Magic use the $17.8 million traded-player exception it obtained?The team has one calendar year to use it.

6. Can the Magic use their new cap flexibility to acquire a top-notch free agent or free agents down the line?There’s a fundamental problem with this question: The Magic didn’t create additional salary-cap space in this deal.

Howard is due to earn about $19.5 million this season, but he wasn’t going to remain with the Magic after this year anyway.

The Magic jettisoned Jason Richardson, Chris Duhon and Earl Clark, but their guaranteed salary after this upcoming season — as long as Richardson exercises his player option for 2014-15 — only would have been $14.3 million.

Add in Harrington’s $7.3 million in guaranteed money total for 2013-14 and 2014-15, and I don’t see where the Magic generated cap flexibility that already wasn’t going to be there beginning in the summer of 2014.

7. Will trading Howard now, as opposed to during the season, make it easier for Jacque Vaughn and general manager Rob Hennigan to instill the team-first culture they are seeking to create?Yes.

• • •

I know fans of a team want an immediate judgment on this trade.

I can’t provide that yet, except to say the obvious: that the team didn’t receive equal value for Howard.

Then again, the team never was going to receive equal value because Howard made it clear that he only was interested in playing long-term for two teams, the Nets and the Los Angeles Lakers.

At the time, the Magic looked like they were going nowhere — and they probably weren’t. The team wasn’t going to win a title with its roster as it stood then.

The two deals appeared to pay immediate dividends. The Magic went on a nine-game winning streak.

The team lost momentum after that. It lost its first-round matchup against the Atlanta Hawks, and the contracts it acquired — specifically, Hedo Turkoglu’s and Gilbert Arenas’ — worsened the team’s cap situation. The Magic also lost Marcin Gortat, its second-best asset, in its trade with the Phoenix Suns.

In retrospect, that day proved to be one of the darkest days in franchise history.